Making a point: Illinois inventor wants schools to dump fractions for decimals

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By Burt ConstableArlington Heights Daily Herald

Rockford Register Star

By Burt ConstableArlington Heights Daily Herald

Posted Feb. 10, 2014 at 12:01 AM

By Burt ConstableArlington Heights Daily Herald

Posted Feb. 10, 2014 at 12:01 AM

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS - Having written books, invented gadgets, designed educational toys, started companies, built a collection of pocket sundials and spearheaded community projects, Ed Evenson leads a quest to rid the world of fractions.

"It's become a thing with me," the 85-year-old retired engineer says of his yearlong crusade. Instead of teaching children how to multiply by 5/16ths, we should just let them multiply by 0.3125.

Evenson, a history buff, uses centuries of logic to craft the arguments in his booklet "The Drive for the Decimal Inch: Persuading the Educators." Surveyors and industry, with its milling machines, micrometers and LED calipers, use decimals. Even TV meteorologists shun fractions to report 6.5 inches of snow.

A widower (his wife, Barbara, died of breast cancer a dozen years ago), Evenson lives in the first Rolling Meadows house built with a basement, which he bought in 1954. In addition to his workshop, the home boasts a massive library. Leafing to the Decimal Arithmetick chapter in his copy of William Leybourn's "Cursus Mathematicus," published more than 300 years ago, Evenson points to the conclusion: "Decimal operations do afford so great help, that many Ages before have not produced a more useful Invention."

That's not even the oldest book on Evenson's shelves. He owns a 1529 copy of Apianus' "Cosmographicus Liber." It's in Latin, "the only one I can't read," Evenson says.

Born in Montana, Evenson spent his childhood in Washington when his father, Arthur, became one of the new Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s original employees. After the death of his father, Evenson finished high school in Racine, Wis., where his mother, Ruby, moved to be closer to relatives and become a teacher.

Evenson still cherishes the Christmas present he got as a 5-year-old from his parents: a complete set of the 1933 Compton Encyclopedia. He noted on an inside cover that it was a present from "Ruby and Daddy."

"I didn't know how to spell mother, but I knew how to spell Ruby. I was a horrible speller. Math was my good subject. English was my bad subject. And history was between the two."

Needing his mother's signature to enlist in the Army when he was 17, Evenson was part of the force sent to occupy Japan after World War II. But he developed rheumatic fever, which damaged his heart, and was sent home on a hospital ship. Public Law 16, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1943, paid for his industrial engineering education at the University of Wisconsin after he tested into the program.

He married in 1951 and worked for an electrical company before launching his own business making testing equipment for automobile shops. In 1972, Evenson wrote his first book, "Automotive Test Equipment You Can Build." He signed a copy for his teacher mother with the misspelling, "Your son, the writter."

"I thought she'd be tickled. It didn't tickle her at all."

Page 2 of 2 - He's written books on auto repair, a children's book about the history of the calendar and "The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876," in which he makes the case that Elisha Gray should get much of the credit that generally goes to Alexander Graham Bell.

A father of three boys, Evenson made a metal armillary sphere that was marketed and sold as an education "Starfinder" for kids in the late 1960s. His other educational toys included weather forecasting kits and the "RIC 920," a rock identification computer that used basic tests and mechanical punch cards to identify minerals.

"What I do now is write for the grandkids - things I think they should know about, but don't," the grandfather of nine says. "This campaign I'm on now is because of my engineering background. As far as I'm concerned, fractions are a waste of time."

Convincing educators of that might not be successful. He never could get companies to buy his simple attachment that turned ordinary staplers into bookbinder tools, and even though he helped bring a drive-through mailbox to his local post office, the post office later closed.

Evenson learned fractions as a kid.

"I just accepted it. I didn't have any opinions in those days," he says, adding that today's students should be given rulers with markings for each 10th of an inch. The only fractions he doesn't want eliminated are the "conversational fractions," he says, explaining how people still should know concepts such as half-baked, three-quarters of an hour or how to divide a pizza into thirds.

"That's all you need to know about fractions," Evenson proclaims. "Multiplying 7-and-5/8ths by 13-and-7/64s is ridiculous."